Slashdot Mirror
Using the Semantic Web to Enhance Search
RobMcCool writes "At Stanford KSL, we really like the Semantic Web. So we've taken many of our favorite web sites, scraped them, and put together a huge pile of RDF, which we'll let you download. We've used that RDF to create a search application, in the spirit of Google Q & A or Microsofts recently announced MSN Search extensions. Our search can answer simple factual queries like the previously discussed population of Portugal but can also answer some more complex ones. We also have a smart autocomplete system, type "tom hanks birth" slowly to see it in action (best with Firefox). We're looking for people to be a part of this search system by running their own search sites, and by putting their data on the Semantic Web. Come check it out!"
The Stanford research is interesting, but I'm still trying to make up my mind about the Semantic Web, learning about RDF, and whether I need to bake in ways of handling these kinds of assertions in my web app. The Stanford group writes, "Our hope is that our search application spurs development of the Semantic Web, and leads to sites publishing their data in this format so that we don't have to." It obviously takes more work to encode such information and getting user contributions auto-marked for the semantic web. For a counter viewpoint, take a look at some of Clay Shirky's work -- in particular:
Will the semantic web be supported by future versions of Drupal, phpBB, and other grass-roots content management web apps? Not sure. Since a lot of the content is visitor generated, you would have to build in ways of providing easy markup. Would be interested to hear /. thoughts on the matter.
As one who has written semantic web pages, it's also rather difficult. OWL is a real pain to write, and most interpreters don't support "OWL Full", which means I'm stuck writing for either "OWL Lite" (now with only half the calories!) or "OWL DL". Forget (X)HTML, too - you need to use XML+RDF to use OWL, which means that if you want content you either need a parser or you need to code two documents for each one: One for human readability, and one that contains the metadata. There used to be a language called SHOE that embedded metadata into HTML via meta tags, but that seemed to have been supplanted by DAML+OIL and OWL.
If it's made easier to write (like SHOE was, actually), I can see widespread adoption, because the idea of adding machine-searchable metadata to a document is very good; the implementation is just very poor. Otherwise, expect to be paying your web developers a lot more, both rate and timewise, in the future!